Trump will test Trudeau. How might he react?

Chances are that Donald Trump is not going to be convening any all-day cabinet meetings on how to deal with the Canadian government — even if he is flattered that Justin Trudeau’s ministers are spending so much time in Calgary this week thinking about the new president.

Since Trump’s new administration seems keen to start talking to Canada about reopening the North American Free Trade Agreement, it would make sense for Americans to acquire at least a vague understanding of the negotiating style and skills of the Trudeau government.

So, if there was such a how-to manual, what would it say? What have we learned in the past 15 months or so about how the Trudeau team handles negotiations?

It depends on who’s writing the manual. The provinces, for instance, have been getting to know a federal government that comes to the table with a strong point of view — in this case, on how health-care dollars should be spent. Though Trudeau’s team went into December talks on a health-care accord mouthing nice words about pan-Canadian agreement and consensus, we’ll remember that the meeting ended without peace, love and harmony in our time.

In the aftermath, Ottawa has been going around making side deals on health care with willing, individual provinces and territories; so far, that list includes Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nunavut, Yukon and the Northwest Territories.

We’ll also remember that Trudeau’s government brought a similar, take-it-or-leave-it approach to the table with the provinces on the matter of carbon pricing. Actually, it didn’t bring anything to the table: Trudeau made the carbon-price announcement far away in Ottawa while Environment Minister Catherine McKenna was meeting with the provinces in Montreal.

So we can gather from these examples that Trudeau’s government isn’t exactly a pushover at negotiations, and it seems ready to walk away from the desire for consensus to make individual, bilateral deals. That’s something Mexico should keep in mind if it’s wondering how much Canada will hang in with that country in the reopened NAFTA talks.

However, Canada doesn’t walk into talks with the Americans from a position of overwhelming strength — so the lessons learned from provincial negotiations to date have limited application to the Canada-U.S. scene. Ottawa is able to wield clout in those discussions on health and the environment because it has something the provinces and territories want and need: money.

What will Trudeau do when confronted with an issue that touches on both aspects of governance — such as immigration and refugee policy? What if Trump starts complaining that Canada’s more open attitude to outsiders is making the U.S. border vulnerable?

When it comes to dealing with the new Trump administration and the president’s avowed, America-First principles, Canada is the one at the table with something to lose if the U.S. walks away.

But the Trudeau government could be looking at the side-deal tactic as a way of looking at the United States as a fractured whole under Trump — not as one voice at the table, but as many voices at the congressional, state and even municipal levels. That’s probably why you’ve seen Trudeau talking up the need for mayors and premiers to fan out with their contacts all over the U.S. — in effect, decentralizing the Canada-U.S. relationship to many, many moving parts.

Which probably also tells us that Trudeau’s government is trying to deal with the U.S. not simply through ‘Trump’s America’ but through Americans themselves — in all their divided, polarized glory at the moment. It reminds me a little bit of how Jean Chrétien’s government tried to be two things at once: fiscally conservative (deficit-slaying) and socially liberal (same-sex rights, gun control) in the 1990s.

It could be that Trudeau’s trying a similar balancing act: making nice with Trump when it comes to dollars and cents, but drawing a line with the new administration on issues of civil rights and social policy.

What will he do, though, when confronted with an issue that touches on both aspects of governance — such as immigration and refugee policy? What if Trump starts complaining that Canada’s more open attitude to outsiders is making the U.S. border vulnerable?

Trudeau himself doesn’t have much of a track record as a negotiator in his pre-political life. People around him do, though — notably his chief of staff, Katie Telford, who was in charge of some tough negotiations with teachers’ unions and school boards when she was still in her 20s, working for then Ontario minister of education Gerard Kennedy. Telford went back to school after that experience, enrolling in a master’s program in industrial relations and human resources at the University of Toronto to hone her negotiating skills.

That degree was put on hold, though, when she decided to join Trudeau’s inner circle back in 2013. (Telford also was a major player in talks to form a Liberal-NDP coalition immediately after the 2008 election, when she worked for Liberal leader Stéphane Dion). So while it’s not clear she needed any heavy negotiating skills in her initial meetings with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, earlier this month in Washington, Telford didn’t walk into the encounter as any sort of rookie.

Talk has started already about whether Canada is getting too fixated with Trump — whether these all-day cabinet sessions reveal a state of weakness or uncertainty in the face of the new president. No one wants to see Canada remaking itself entirely to react to a president we didn’t elect (and likely wouldn’t have elected, given the choice).

But Trump, whether he knows much about Canada right now, is going to test the Trudeau government’s negotiating skills. In the process, a whole new manual is going to be written on how this prime minister handles himself in tight situations.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

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Susan Delacourt is one of Canada's best-known political journalists. Over her long career she has worked at some of the top newsrooms in the country, from the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail to the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post. She is a frequent political panelist on CBC Radio and CTV. Author of four books, her latest — Shopping For Votes — was a finalist for the prestigious Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Canadian non-fiction in 2014. She teaches classes in journalism and political communication at Carleton University.